


Stories, Told To The Wind

by ScriveSpinster



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar, Sunless Sea
Genre: Gen, M/M, Three-sentence Ficlets, Urchins - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-04
Updated: 2019-02-04
Packaged: 2019-10-22 01:30:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 2,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17653454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScriveSpinster/pseuds/ScriveSpinster
Summary: Three-sentence ficlets, collected here. A little humor, some angst, mostly odd bits of Neathiness.





	1. A dessert with unexpected side effects (Neath colors)

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. A dessert with unexpected side effects (Neath colors)  
> 2\. A hot shower and a change of clothes, Brass Embassy style  
> 3\. Strange and distant music (the Forgotten Quarter)  
> 4\. In the world of dreams, I have chosen my part (The Jovial Contrarian)  
> 5\. If I had to pick a human... (Mr Pages)  
> 6\. Would it please you to listen to the thunder instead (Urchin OC)  
> 7\. Absurdism is challenge-sense (The Iron Republic)  
> 8\. Make-believe (The Jewel-Turbaned Youth)  
> 9\. Sharing secrets (Player)  
> 10\. Poker Night (Salt, Stone, and Storm)  
> 11\. What is Love (The Lady In Lilac)  
> 12\. Some things you will remember (Urchin Background Zee-Captain & Longshanks Gunner)  
> 13\. Anything you can do, I can do better (Feducci/Contrarian)  
> 14\. Ritual (The Nurse’s Sister)

Irrigo tastes of loss and frost, and other delicacies not easily distilled, while violant burns the tongue as it burns the mind, and only the bravest have a taste for it; apocyan, they say, is light but lingering, and differs from peligin only in how deep a draught you dare to drink, and how much it weighs on you when the cup is empty.

Cosmogone is sweet until it grows bitter, and connoisseurs of nostalgia have traded emperors’ fortunes for even a diluted drop; Viric is sweeter still, piquant as the fruit of dreams, and it will leave you ravenous.

Gant tastes of nothing at all, and you will never forget it – no matter how long you live, no matter how desperately you try.


	2. A hot shower and a change of clothes, Brass Embassy style

The Brass Embassy, you’ve discovered, has amenities that the rest of London can only dream of: heated baths and showers adjoined to private rooms, water scented not with sulfur but with rose petals, air so thick with steam it obscures the view. You stand beneath the stream of water and scrub until your skin is pink and raw and the chill of the city is almost gone; it has to be some sort of irony, you suppose, that it takes the work of hell to leave you feeling clean, but you’re not complaining.

Outside the door, silent servants have laid out the things you’ll wear tonight: Puzzle Damask and Parabola linen, burnished brass jewelry and a mask for the masque; dressed like that, it’s easy to believe you could become someone else, well rid of sorrow – the kind of person, you’d have said once, who dances with devils and gets away free, but in the end, there’s no one who does that and doesn’t pay.


	3. Strange and Distant Music (The Forgotten Quarter)

The first thing that strikes you about the Forgotten Quarter is how quiet it is; in the city proper, noise is inescapable – rattling carts and foot traffic, urchin song, costermongers hawking their wares – but here, silence settles on your shoulders like fog. But what you realize, as you make your way through courtyards long fallen empty, is that it isn’t silent at all; in the absence of city sounds, you can hear for the first time the slow drip of water and the scuttling of small things that live in darkness, a soft susurrus that isn’t the wind – and quieter still, half-heard, the sweet and distant lilt of flute and string. You’ve heard that music before, you think, in the borderlands of dream or on the edge of memory – the ghost of a song, maybe, like this is the ghost of a place, some old, stubborn remnant of a time when those windows were lit and the trees bright with blossoms; whatever it is, it calls you onward, and you lift your lantern higher and follow it into the dark.


	4. In the world of dreams, I have chosen my part (The Jovial Contrarian)

Arbor is a beautiful city, with its white roads and green bowers and red, red roses; it’s a dream as tempting as a cool glass of water in a parched land, and that’s not _why_ the Contrarian doesn’t trust it – he doesn’t trust anything until it’s been tried, tested, twisted, turned inside out, and tested again, and even then there’s always more proving to do – but it doesn’t help. 

He’s been thinking a lot about cities lately: real and unreal, toppled and fallen and rising; he’s got an ugly one that he intends to look after, and if that means making himself ambassador to a place that doesn’t exist, well, he has no doubt the experience will be educational. But as long as there’s a choice, and he means to see that there will be, he won’t lead a retreat into dreaming, or sign London over to another set of masters – no matter how smooth their paths, or how lovely their gifts and gardens.


	5. If I had to pick a human... (Mr Pages)

They are odd creatures, all: flighty, fleeting, though there is occasional magnificence in their scribings; even here, where time and death sit lightly, it does not pay to grow attached. But your claws skim across a story of love in common verse – the dying tale of one who watched the stars, all fond and never fearful – and for one fragmentary second, the arc of eternity lost is so briefly recaptured; you are not like Veils, all mad in your melancholy, but you have yearned, and you have striven in your chains, and in those words you see that they have yearned and striven too.

 _She,_ you think, who wrote this – could you take but one of them with you, when you fly again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the poem Pages is thinking of:
> 
> https://www.naic.edu/~gibson/poems/swilliams1.html


	6. Would it please you to listen to the thunder instead (Urchin OC)

They’re always singing here: old arias half-heard around corners, odd lines of lilting melody weaving through the air; it’s the prettiest thing she ever did hear, and they mean to teach her too, and so many other things besides – writing and maths and all the secrets of the city, or at least the ones that rich folk care about – if only she’ll forget that she was once a Fisher King, and remember only that she wants to be a diplomat instead. And she _does_ want to, more than anything, but – it’s not even that she can tell there’s things they aren’t saying about this place, or what it _means_ to be a spy in service to the crown; it’s the thunder’s low, warning growl outside her window at night, the wind that whispers and howls like language on the edge of sense, and it’s the way she’d known how to listen, once, and knows she could again if only she chose. 

Out the window, then, and onto the roof, until she can make a run for a nearby pagoda – and _leap_ – and catch the edge, kicking at thin air as she hauls herself up and over to safety; she shivers as the cold begins to sink through her linen nightgown, knowing she’ll miss the warm bed she left behind, and the music, and even the etiquette and baths and the stiff clothing – but somewhere out there on the rooftops, her old gang is waiting for her, and she can hear Storm’s song calling her home.


	7. Absurdism is challenge-sense (The Iron Republic)

**Day One:** A peculiar place, the Iron Republic — inhabited by revolutionaries, devils, university students, devils, ambulatory blurs of light and heat, bees, and devils; in that regard, much like a more confusing Benthic, only here one might spend the day debating the nature of reality not with intoxicated undergraduates, but with the equally intoxicated concept of the nature of reality itself; reality, one notes, cannot hold its liquor, which I suspect explains rather a lot.

 **Day Nine:** Now that time has ceased running backwards and the alphabet no longer attempts to squirm away from my pen, I may jot down with a certain degree of irritation that my favorite waistcoat has been damaged by today’s rain of fish scales, violet ink, and lemon juice, with available replacements prone to whistling vexing popular melodies, offering unsolicited financial advice (lost two-hundred echoes on waistcoat-encouraged investment in imaginary weather device), and combustion; I begin to grow nostalgic for Law.

 **Day ~~Fifteen~~ ~~Six~~ ~~Twenty-Nine~~ Uncertain**: Soul sold, regained, lost in bet, regained again, stolen by bees, found again unexpectedly in bird’s nest made of glass needles and childhood memories (not mine – date back to Second City; river, sun... crocodiles?), may not be one I started out with — but I am no worse the wear for it, if one discounts the spontaneous flashes of magnetism and the craving for cucumber-and-irrational-number flavored custard, and indeed I feel I may have gotten the better of the exchange; in any case, this place is not without its charms, and — despite absence of custard — I am increasingly tempted to stay.


	8. Make-believe (The Jewel-Turbaned Youth)

Your childhood is spent in brightness, surrounded by white flowers and hymns, and not a shadow is ever allowed fall on you, nor a sorrow, nor a scar; even when your mother discovers you playing with two pieces of cutlery – you have decided, in the way of children, that one is a bold guardsman, the other a monster from the terrible lands outside the gates – you are not punished, but gently corrected: _it is dangerous, my young one, to go making games of what is not._

*

 _Fear dreams,_ the priests of Mihir say, _fear snakes, fear smoke, fear the dark_ , but when ships make port here, they let the Taamas through, carrying their salt-scent and darkness with them; you watch the zailors in the streets sometimes, clustered close and speaking low, and it is blasphemy, but when you see those faces scarred by salt, marked by hunger, you cannot stop yourself from wondering – what dangers shaped them so, and what brought them here to safety, and what terrors ( _what marvels_ ) might they have seen in the fallen world beyond the light?

*

The Taamas captain’s voice is rough, but when she speaks, it takes on a rhythm like song, and what she speaks of – it isn’t real, it never was, but even as you shiver at the wrongness, you hear truth beneath the lies, like light on the edge of shadow on the edge of light; you listen to her tale, the rise and fall of it like waves in darkness, and as those waves submerge you, every story you never told comes spinning back, and you are changed.


	9. Sharing Secrets (Player)

The easiest way, and the most untraceable, but also perhaps the chanciest, is simply to say what you want to be heard when a cat is there to listen; they keep their secrets close, and don’t give them up to just anyone, but to catch a cat is to earn a tale and everyone in London knows it. Or, of course, you might try a few choice words whispered between sips of honeyed wine at some half-scandalous salon – _In debt to whom?_ and _caught at the Parlor of Virtue, really?_ ; they’ll forget the source but remember the secrets, carry them like spores and shed a few wherever they go. Or, the urchins say, those who know the right words can stand on a rooftop, tell their tales to the wind and see where the wind carries them – but be careful with that, for the wind is old and the wind is merciless, and no matter how canny you are, it always takes a little more than you plan to offer.


	10. Poker Night (Salt, Stone, and Storm)

Heard tell from an old zailor once, out near Shepherd’s Wash, that there’s a place in Parabola where every seven days – or years, maybe, or centuries – three powers meet. Saw it once in a dream, he claims: a dragon all coiled ‘round itself, or the shape of a dragon seen in roiling thunderclouds, and a bright mountain rising from earth to heaven, and a light so fierce it leaves you blind to look at it, all gathered ‘round for – it ain’t really a game of cards and a round of drinks, no, but he says there’s no better way to think of it, and it _is_ a game.

He didn’t say – and I ain’t sure I want to know – what stakes they played for, or which one among them won.


	11. What is Love (The Lady In Lilac)

I have asked that question of many people, in this city and others, and every time, the answer changes; I’ve spoken with a youth from Veilgarden, who carried a mushroom bouquet for their sweetheart and talked only of joy, and a mother in the slums of Blythenhale singing her hungry infant to sleep, and a man with a scar ringed ‘round his neck, who gave me a beatific smile and, in his cracked, quiet voice, whispered _self-abnegation_. Every word they told me, I carry with me, like _she_ , one day, will carry them to the stars – and in the end, they‘re still only stories, shards of mirror-glass reflecting shards of worlds; just because something can be written in blood doesn’t make it true.

But if these fragments are all I can offer, still I tell myself that a myriad of little reflections might be enough; as for me, I believe what I must: love is the thing that breaks the Chain.


	12. Some things you will remember (Urchin Background Zee-Captain & Longshanks Gunner)

The labyrinthine hulk of Khan’s Shadow rises from the zee, a creaking port of water-damp wood and salt-corroded metal, contraband and backalley dealings and song; the Longshanks Gunner stands at the prow as they steam closer, and he stands at her side, and together they watch the lights glimmer on black water. He’ll say goodbye to her there, and she’s made him promise to bring her zee-stories and pirate treasure, but one of the things the zee has taught him is that sometimes ways part and never reconverge. 

“Steal a few hats for me,” he says, “for old time’s sake,” and what he means – what he doesn’t say, even when she pulls him into one last rib-crushing hug, because there’s no need to say what both of them know and have always known – is _I won’t forget you._


	13. Anything you can do, I can do better (Feducci/Contrarian)

“I will be interested,” Feducci says, after negotiations of greater urgency are concluded, “to see whether my successor has it in him to match my standard for audacity in London politics.”

“They stare when they see you,” the Contrarian acknowledges, “and I wouldn’t doubt that whispers about devils and dueling and the current state of the mayoral residence follow.” He props himself up on one elbow, eyeing Feducci’s half-unbandaged form with a scrutiny that isn’t _entirely_ critical, and adds, “When they see me, they _run_.”


	14. Ritual (The Nurse’s Sister)

The fog rises thick, on the morning when the girl who was once the Nurse’s sister sits perched on the spire of St. Fiacres, running nervous fingers over the lightning pattern on her scarf and looking down into an ocean of silver-white like a pale mirror to the zee her sister now sails; sunrise means nothing at all down here in the dark, but morning is still the time when things begin, and she can feel the breath caught in her lungs, waiting, like she is, to become something new.

 _It’s music,_ Slivvy had told her in his stuttering voice, _what calls the thunder down,_ but Slivvy isn’t here to start the chant, or finish it if she falters, or remind her again that she has to be careful with songs and storms and offerings; this is a thing she has to do alone. So she stands, balanced at the spire’s edge with nothing to catch her fall, and she sings a song with no words – or none she’s learned yet, no language but the howl of the lonely wind she used to hear through her window at night in that charity school, whispering of home and exile; she offers up her voice to that wind, her past and whatever was held in her empty hands, and in return: the crack of lightning and the thunder’s answer, the gathering clouds, the promise of rain on her upturned face.


End file.
